The AfD and Ms Wagenknecht are placing strain on “a mix of underserved points that the mainstream events are too lazy or too scared or ideologically too embarrassed to cope with,” he mentioned, citing rising crime, migration, the failure to combine migrants and the pressures they placed on beforehand homogeneous communities.
Carsten Schneider, a resident of Thuringia who’s the consultant of the federal authorities in East Germany, prefers to emphasise the instability of get together loyalties within the east because the fall of the wall. Ms. Wagenknecht cleverly performs on “a quite simple anti-Americanism, Germany as a giant Switzerland” between the superpowers, anti-immigration backlash and anti-elitism, he mentioned. “Let’s simply say she performs the piano,” he mentioned with a touch of grudging admiration.
Bodo Ramelow, the present head of Thuringia from the left, mentioned: “She is turning into the embodiment of anti-Americanism; she will get on folks’s nerves. He added that she is superb at enjoying the “politics of feelings”.
In a recent interview with Die Zeit newspaper, Wolf Biermann, 87, the German singer-songwriter and former East German dissident, was often extra blunt. “Sahra Wagenknecht is the anachronistic head of a celebration with a cult of persona, the standard construction of totalitarian get together apparatuses,” he mentioned.
Once I requested whether or not her get together, which retains its membership small and secretive, was constructed on Leninist ideas, Ms. Wagenknecht bristled. “It has nothing to do with Leninism,” she mentioned, however solely with making an attempt to construct a celebration that “would not entice a whole lot of adventurers or radicals.” The AfD, she famous, started as a celebration of conservative economists.
